Through the Internet and other networks, users have gained access to large amounts of information distributed over a large number of computers. In order to access the vast amounts of information, users typically implement a user browser to access a search engine. The search engine responds to an input user query by returning one or more sources of information available over the Internet or other network.
In operation, the search engine typically implements a crawler to access a plurality of information sources and stores references to those information sources in an index. The references in the index may be categorized based on one or more keywords.
Often, users may want to search for resources such as businesses that are located in a specific geographic area. For instance, a user may want to locate a service near the user's home of office. In another example, a user may be searching for restaurants in a city that the user expects to visit.
Currently, when a user wants a search to be geographically focused, the user may access online yellow pages that provide names and phone numbers of businesses within the selected geographic area. Similar services include business locator services such as local services provided through Google or Yahoo. Alternatively, the user may insert the name of a geographic area in the user query. Problems arise using both of these traditional approaches. The online yellow pages resource often fails to provide sufficient information about the businesses. While the yellow pages may provide a business address and phone number, the user is forced to call the business to obtain information regarding services or fees as limited information is typically available through the yellow pages. The second approach, in which a user inserts a geographic area in the query string, will often cause incomplete and inaccurate results to be produced. Many potential results in the searched area may be omitted based on the keyword search and other results may be erroneously included as a result of the keyword search.
Accordingly, a solution is needed for providing a geographic online search tool that matches geographic locations rather than simply words from a user input query. Furthermore, a solution is needed that will provide results including more complete and accurate information in response to a user query.